I like the random tidbits that are sometimes shown at the bottom of the screen when I'm practicing, (eg The original name of the Starship Enterprise was the Yorktown), but it'd be even cooler if you had an option to receive those tidbits in the language that you are studying. They don't have to be personalized for that person's study level, although I suppose they could. It would just be a nice way to be even more immersed in the language.

Thanks!
Taiwan Shaun

well, to carry the idea even further, it would be great to get a sentence in the target language that includes the word currently being studied.

This would allow us to learn the word with a context, as well as expose us to good Chinese (or Japanese) syntax and grammar.

It could be displayed unobtrusively, so that those who don't want to read it don't have to, and so that even those who want to read it can do it in an almost subliminal way.

My intuition tells me that even such an unobtrusive exposure would multiply our word retention, language comprehension and sentence production skills in the long run.

I don't know if there's a ready source of such sentences on the Internet. This might be something we users can contribute to, in the way that user-contributed word definitions may be in the works.

I'm not sure of the quality of sentences this would produce, but it could just search Google for the vocabulary items, then pull out sentences from the results. This would provide almost limitless example material.

When the time comes that Skritter has example sentences, I'd love it to be able to search through my Anki deck (or export this, etc) to find sentences using the particular word.

There is an excellent source of sample sentences. You just google for movie/tv subtitles websites and download thousands of subtitles text files. (:

The only catch is converting them into something useful is not straight forward, often the subtitles go over several sections ie.... "bob something... ... then something"

It is difficult to put these lines back together because subtitles generally dont have useful punctuation.

See my TV words study list for an example of what you can do with this data:
http://www.skritter.com/vocab/tags?tag=most-common

Could also retrieve from various translations of wikipedia.org (eg zh.wikipedia.org, etc)? They expose the API for this sort of thing anyway. Ton of material there, definitely.

I've posted this before but www.engkoo.com is a great source for sample sentences, even if it's intended more for chinese speakers translating english.

The wikipedia one is a good example! My only concern about wikipedia as a source of sample sentences is that it is probably more formal. Depends on if you want sample sentences that represent conversation, or technical writing.